The results proved that the right responses happened by chance and that mapping touch to sight is learned behavior. Nevertheless, in a matter of a few days, even without training, the children learnt to recognize the objects they touched and saw.
Loes van Dam at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, states, "The fact that this learning needs so little time suggests that the necessary hardware and wiring was already in place in these children before the operation" despite never having been used.
Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a neurologist and neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston says," The change in the children's ability to integrate touch and vision happens too fast to be explained by major rewiring in the brain." They needed a little bit of visual experience to learn to translate between the two senses.
So, although Molyneux's question is answered negatively in the beginning, it becomes a 'yes' very soon.
Source: Medindia
